Canadian mechanic builds a ski car

Being Canadian means a lot of things. For example, I’ve driven a car, an ATV, and a snowmobile. But this, this is something else.

Canadian inventor and mechanic Tod Anderson has taken a Smart car and converted it into a … snowmobile car? Snow car? Ski car — Let’s go with that because I just got back from a ski trip.

In short, Anderson decided to add custom skis to the front of his 2006 Smart car and winter ATV tracks to the rear, because why the hell not. The result? A diesel-fueled ski car that lets you drive across snow at speeds up to 70 km/h (that’s 43.5 mph for y’all Americans).

Seriously, why drive a snowmobile when you can do the same thing in the comfort of a warm car?

The story goes that the invention was a local secret, until last week when someone snapped a picture and uploaded it to Reddit.

It inevitably went viral. The original photo, shared below, was simply captioned “Only in Canada.”

“It’s just a thought that came to me and it seemed like the right thing to do,” Anderson told CTV News. “It’s a rear-drive, rear-engine car, so it’s ideal for this sort of thing. The whole point of this exercise was to see if it could be done.”

Well, point proven. And apparently Anderson says it only cost him about $7,000 CAD (that’s $5,250 USD) and six weeks to build. If he ever wants his Smart car back, it only takes an hour to put the wheels back on.

I’m having difficulty finishing this up because my mind keeps skiing off on its own to imagine what I would with my own ski car. Oh geez, what if all my friends had their own ski cars? The only real problem here is that the ski car isn’t street legal.